Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – horrifying Nintendo sequel-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – why does he look like that? (Nintendo)

Nintendo’s first ever 18-rated video game is not what you’d expect from the initial teaser images, as Famicom Detective Club returns.

The best part of Emio – The Smiling Man is the initial marketing, before anyone knew what it really was. In a very un-Nintendo move, they teased the game with some creepy survival horror style imagery, which had people guessing for days as to what the game might be – before being horribly disappointed when it turned out to be a new Famicom Detective Club game.

The franchise is almost unknown in the West and only got its first release outside of Japan in 2021, with a remake compilation of the original two NES (known as the Famicom in Japan) games. They’re both visual novels, not entirely dissimilar to Ace Attorney, but with more interactivity than normal, as you try to solve various crimes as a teenage detective.

A lot of work was put into the remakes, but it was clear the appeal was primarily nostalgia for a Japanese audience, with Nintendo not even bothering to provide English voiceovers. They were interesting oddities but the prospect of a brand new entry, with a higher 18 age rating, is very exciting… in theory.

Nintendo has dabbled with horror many times in the past, publishing the likes of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and various Project Zero/Fatal Frame games, as well as securing several Resident Evil exclusives on the GameCube. An internally developed horror game would’ve been something very different but, unfortunately, that’s not what this is.

It does deal with more serious topics than the original games, and as usual the victims are all teenagers, but the tone, presentation, and graphics are all but identical to the remakes. So that means strangely inconsistent visuals – with several characters drawn in an overtly cartoon style for no obvious reason, inappropriately cheerful music, and gameplay that is based far more on luck than judgement.

This is disappointing because you would’ve assume the whole point of doing a brand new game was to evolve the formula and take advantage of modern technology and gameplay concepts. But that’s not happened at all. This just reuses exactly the same graphics and interface to tell a new story, while once again not bothering to have any English voiceovers.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – semi-interactive entertainment (Nintendo)

We wondered, in our hands-on preview of the game, whether it might be heading for some sort of tonal twist in its later hours but, inevitability, that’s not the case. You play the role of a 19-year-old at a private detective agency, who, through your boss’ connections, are brought in by the police to help with a case where a 15-year-old boy has been found strangled and a paper bag, with a smiley face drawn on it, placed over his head.

Additional intrigue emerges when it’s realised that the case seems to be related to similar events from several years ago, as well as an urban legend about the Smiling Man (which is what Emio means in Japanese), who approaches emotionally disturbed young girls and offers to end their suffering.

That all sounds very dark and disturbing on paper but the colourful presentation and music dulls its impact considerably. There is a slight tonal shift whenever the Smiling Man is on screen, but in no way can this be considered a horror game. Issues like suicide and depression are also raised, and fairly delicately too, but it just seems so silly trying to tell a serious story in this way.

It’s frustrating too, because the dialogue is generally very good, which is usually the case with games translated by Nintendo of America, and there’s even some successful moments of levity. Although inevitably these sit uncomfortably next to all the child killing and a number of creepy side characters, including more than one sex pest.

Arguably, the biggest problem is that the gameplay is basically a lottery. You have several menu options to talk to people and examine the scene or move to new locations but there’s often little or no signposting, and most scenes involve you just blindly trying every single option in a hope that one of them will trigger some forward momentum.

This is made extra difficult because sometimes the answer is to examine an area of the screen (including the person you’re talking), despite you having no obvious reason to do so. Also, the game never indicates when you’ve finished a particular dialogue path and will happily add extra responses halfway through a scene, with no way for you to know anything’s changed.

Emio fails completely as an adventure game, because there’s no real puzzle solving and most progression feels arbitrary. But it also fails as a visual novel, because you can’t just sit back and follow the story, because it’s often not clear how to advance it.

It’s all very odd and while we can understand keeping things old school with the remakes, making a new game as if it’s still 1988 seems entirely the wrong approach.

If this makes veteran Famicom Detective Club fans happy then great, but for everyone else this has very limited appeal. It’s well made and would probably have worked well as a more traditional, and therefore less interactive, visual novel. As it is, it’s even more of a curiosity than the remakes of the originals, not least because it’s a rare example of a Nintendo sequel that makes no effort to improve or innovate on the previous entries.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £39.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo and Mages
Release Date: 29th August
Age Rating: 18

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – not very horrific (Nintendo)

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